Samsung SSDs Dying! 980 Pro, 990, 970 EVO PLUS, PM9A1 and More Reporting Failures – Everything We Know So Far!

Samsung SSD Failure Reports Increasing – What is happening?

Note, Feb 15/02/23 – There is Updated Information on the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD Firmware Issue. You can find out more in the article and video below:

Samsung 990 Pro SSD Firmware Failures UPDATED VideoHERE

Samsung 990 Pro SSD Failures UPDATED ArticleHERE

Reports have been increasingly online in the last 6 months or so of Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD drives failing unexpectedly failing, despite being well under the write and endurance levels that they arrive with. First emerging in China on the forum ChipHell, these sporadic failures started to get present something of a pattern among the user base, with specific drive models and firmware in common. Then later, huge US-based PC builder Puget Systems started seeing an increase from their customer base of similar drive failure rates (in particular, but not limited to, the Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4 SSD. Puget stated the following online:

Despite historically being some of our most reliable parts, we have received a surprising number of reports of failing Samsung drives, specifically with the 2TB version of the 980 Pro. We have been working with Samsung to investigate these failures, and they have recently confirmed that there is an issue affecting the older firmware that some 980 Pro drives were shipped with. The most common failure mode that we have found is that the drives are suddenly locked into read-only mode, rendering the drive unusable. If the failed drive is the primary drive, then the system becomes unbootable until the drive is replaced and the OS is reinstalled. – Puget Systems, Support

Although not initially loud on this, Samsung has since confirmed (in conjunction with Puget Systems input) that they are aware of the issue affecting drives with the firmware version 3B2QGXA7 and recommends users update the firmware on all Samsung 980 Pro drives to the latest version (5B2QGXA7, at time of writing) using the Samsung Magician tool for PC/Mac to prevent the issue from occurring. Much like any other SSD firmware update, this is not going to reinitialize the SSD or format it in any way, so all data stored onboard will be maintained. Though for some users who are using Samsung 980 Pro SSDs in closed systems (such as PS5 and it’s expansion storage bay), there is no real way to check the firmware of the SSD in the Playstation 5 GUI, as well as update the firmware. If you are a PS5 user and concern about how you check/update your firmware, skip ahead to the bottom of the article. Otherwise, let’s discuss how the Samsung SSD has been reported to affect users.

How Does the Samsung SSD Issue manifest itself?

Although the bulk of the initially reported failures that people were experiencing with firmware 5B2QGXA7 rise appeared in China, the steady increase in other regions was not slow to follow (appearing on Reddit in numerous posts, for example HERE and HERE ) with many users highlighting that the firmware issue would manifest itself within 6-12 months of use. Using the disk maintenance tool CrystalDiskInfo, users began seeing the health of drives drop and increased values in 0E and 03 measurement IDs from within the program:

ID in AIDA64 ID in CrystalDiskInfo Attribute Description Value
160 0E Media Errors (Media and Data Integrity Errors) > 0
3 03 Available Spare < 100 (or < 0x64)

You can download CrystalDisknfo HERE (it’s free). For those with less experienced, using this tool you are able to get a comprehensive breakdown of the SSD in your system and from there you can find out the drive’s health (including total power on time, write amount, temperature over time, S.M.A.R.T info and more). For example, here are two tests of two Samsung SSDs, the Samsung 980 Pro and Samsung 970 EVO Plus (so you know where to look, these are NOT drives that have been affected by this firmware issue):

If you have already been affected by this firmware issue on your Samsung SSD (and you do not run routine checks on your SSD and/or do not have health monitoring tools such as CrystalDiskInfo in place for alerts), the most immediate impact will be that the SSD will change from ‘Read/Write’ status, to ‘Read Only’. This is a preventative measure by the drive, as it has reported bad blocks/spacing internally. If the SSD is being used as a secondary/additional drive, then you should still have the option to copy the contents over to a health drive (then pursue your warranty with Samsung accordingly – as proceeding with a firmware update will not reverse this!). If an SSD is read-only, then you should already see the difference, as you will not be able to add/write data to it. But, if you still want to be 100% sure, In windows, head to the start menu (or windows icon, depending on your system windows version), and search for Disk Management:

Note – DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING, JUST CHECK. AS CHANGING PARTITIONS OR ANY DRIVE’S IDENTITY HERE CAN RUIN YOUR OS OR FORMAT THE DRIVE!!

If your drive is affected, it will likely show as ‘read only’, as shown below:

Although some users have reported that initial checks, or even periodic passive checks by CrystalDiskInfo have not shown any issues (highlighting that the bug/issue in the firmware is ‘triggered’ by particular activity. Upon checking using the Samsung magician tool (the one you will need to check and update your firmware), they found the bad blocks and details of the SMART values increasing. You can download Samsung Magician HERE.

Once installed and up and running, it should immediately find your SSD, as well as detail the drive’s health, firmware and provide options for numerous diagnostic scans. users who have been impacted by this reported firmware issue, observed the following:

(Source Example – Chiphell, User: Scallion Fish)

Over on Reddit, the issue increased in notoriety with a few affected users and in general PSAs. This detailed further on the specifics of the use with the values that increased in CrystalDiskInfo scanned drives. There is also talk of this appearing on Chinese mainstream media, but links are no longer available and its tough to confirm (see gallery):

Which brings us to now, with this increased reported failure in particular Samsung SSDs, related to the firmware, being reported on numerous online sources (example 1, 2, 3).

This led to Puget Systems releasing a dedicated post on this for their user base that covered alot of information garnered so far (based on reports from their user base) and with further input from Samsung on the issue, which can be found HERE. However, the details surrounding the extent of the affected drives (as this is an old firmware that would have been patched out on later production models of the SSDs over time) and the range of SSDs affected by this (as many Samsung SSDs use similar firmware revisions across ranges – not uncommon among SSD manufacturers).

Which Samsung SSDs are being reported as affected by this firmware issue?

Despite these firmware-related Samsung SSD failures that seem to be hinged on an old firmware revision being observed and reported online for a little under half a year, the details surrounding the affected drive models in the Samsung product family are still a little less clear. Over on Chiphell, a pretty massive consolidation effort has been made to identify affected drives, firmware and revisions. Se below:

Google Translate is your friend here! Below is the translation (again, HUGE thank you to kevin335200 for the arguably thankless task of correlating it all):

At the beginning, everyone should know that S6 is high-risk, but I still want to determine the approximate batch range as much as possible, so I have the following incomplete statistics.  At the beginning of the serial number, it mostly occurs when the amount of writing is < 15T, and the overall concentration is in the whole year of 21 (so the eighth digit is mainly R), but there are still a few at the end of 20 years (the eighth digit is N) and 22 years ( Case update with eight digits T): 870 EVO models will be produced on a revised V6 process from November 2022).

PM9A1 produced in January 22 Source: https://www.chiphell.com/thread -2435363-1-1.html
Source of 970 EVO PLUS produced in April 22: https://tieba.baidu.com/p/8151516105
Source of 980 PRO produced in November 22: https://www.bilibili. com/video/BV1pA411d7sTBecause

it involves multiple models and different generations of master controllers, and PM9A1 also covers batches with factory firmware 7301Q / 7401Q and various OEM firmwares, it can be judged that it has little correlation with master controllers and firmware , but it is still recommended to upgrade to the latest firmware

PM9A1 The current latest 7701Q/7702Q firmware: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-2477782-1-1.html
PM9A3 The current latest 5602Q/7302Q firmware: https://www.chiphell .com/thread-2457407-1-1.html

870 EVO is also a hard-hit area. As a SATA disk, the corresponding SMART item is BB (Uncorrectable Error Count) / C3 (ECC Error Rate), and the FC item is added in the latest SVT02B6Q firmware (CDI is not included, it is displayed as a manufacturer-specific item) , the specific counting meaning is unknown, but it is better to be 0.

Update: According to PM863a Datasheet, FC (decimal ID is 252) should correspond to “Read ECC Count


PS: Thanks to fellow forum member @tide~ for collecting CDI screenshots

The rest of the post by kevin335200 can be found HERE

It is recommended that if the serial number is within the range below, but SMART has not yet reported 0E, it should also be detected by a full scan of Samsung Magician. There are cases where the 0E count is increased after scanning (PM9A1 and other OEM disks that cannot call Magician can be detected by DiskGenius or other software bad blocks. Function replacement). Note: Please try to back up important data before the full scan. If there is a problem with the flash memory itself, there is a very small chance that the disk will be lost during the scan process. A large number of counts/count increase has nothing to do with this incident, please do not Anxiety: 0F count may increase in case of NVMe controller command execution failure, which may just be caused by some insignificant reason:

  • PM9A1: S63JNF0R / S63JNX0T / S64JNE0R / S65XNF0R / S675NF0R / S676NF0R / S676NX0R / S677NF0R / S6W7NF0R
  • 870 EVO: S5Y2NJ0N / S5Y2NJ0R / S5Y3NF0R / S5Y3NG0R / S621NG0R / S625NJ0R / S626NF0R / S626NJ0R / S62BNJ0R / S62CNF0R / S62CNJ0R / S6BANJ0R / S6BBNG0R / S6BCNG0R / S6BCNJ0R / S6PTNZ0R / S6PUNF0R
  • 970 EVO: S464NB0K / S465NF0K / S466NF0K / S466NX0K / S466NX0M / S5H7NS0N / S5H9NS0N
  • 970 EVO PLUS: S6P7NG0R / S6P7NF0T
  • 980: S649NF0R / S649NF1R / S649NG0R / S649NJ0R / S649NX0R / S64ANG0R / S64DNF0R
  • 980 PRO: S5GXNF0R/S5GXNF0T/S5GXNG0N/S5GYNX0R/S69ENF0R/S69ENG0R/S6B0NG0R

Finding further instances of those potentially impacted by this firmware issue has been a little tougher. Reddit poster SourceHansSerf summed it up best in his Reddit post here 5 months ago with “I tried searching in English, but it seems that nobody fell victim to this issue recently. While it is possible that the issue somehow occurs only in certain batches of SSD manufactured and/or sold in China, this problem could also exist globally, but remain undiscovered in regions outside China as it’s rather covert.”. As, despite it being almost half a year later, users that could be potentially affected could be well under the write rate/hours/trigger that seems to cause this health drop, as well as many users being much less frequent with SSD firmware updates (compared with software updates for client software/hardware in every day direct use, eh phones, consoles, etc).

How is Samsung Responding to reports of SSD failures right now?

It should be highlighted that although coverage of this over in the east (going quite widespread on Tieba – the Chinese equivalent of Reddit) this has only recently emerged as a growing concern for users in the west. Aside from the noise that is being made by pudget systems, there is little other large hardware service provider or Samsung associated partner that has raised these issues online – leading some to question until recently if this is related to a bad batch that was only sold in the Eastern regions. Now that a prominent U.S platform has raised the matter related to its user base, with Puget stating:

“Samsung has confirmed they are aware of the issue affecting firmware version 3B2QGXA7 and recommends users update the firmware on all 980 Pro drives to the latest version (5B2QGXA7) to prevent the issue from occurring. The firmware update will be non-invasive and data will be preserved. Nonetheless, we always recommend backing up your data before performing any action that could potentially impact sensitive data.”

If you have a Samsung SSD that you believe might be affected by this firmware issue, it is MASSIVELY recommended performing the firmware update described in this article. Samsung has stated that performing the update should prevent these failures, but it will not reverse the problem on an already failed drive. In other words, if you drive is already showing bad sectors or is in a Read-Only state, you will need to contact Samsung and begins a support RMA/replacement claim with them, under your 5-year included warranty.

How Can a PS5 User Check and Update the Firmware of their Samsung 980 Pro SSD?

Now, the impact of this news on PS5 console owners who are using the Samsung 980 Pro as their storage expansion drive are (understandably) a pinch concerned how/if this will impact them. Given the fact that Siny officially enabled the storage feature on the PS5 in Autumn/Winter 2021, any Samsung Models produced after this date SHOULD have a later firmware onboard that is not impacted by this. However, if you are using a Samsung 980 Pro that was manufactured with the 3B2QGXA7 firmware and you have not updated the firmware yet, it is recommended that you update it to the latest revision. However, for console users, this is easier said than done.

Note: Firmware ‘4B2QGXA7’ is NOT affected by the firmware issue.

How to update the firmware of the PS5 Expansion Samsung 980 Pro SSD?

Annoyingly, it is NOT possible to check/update the firmware on an SSD inside the PS5, as the PS5 software is a closed system. Equally, you cannot remove the SSD and put it inside an external enclosure/docking station that is connected via USB or Thunderbolt, as you need to connect an SSD directly to the motherboard for the system to access the controller onboard the SSD to check and/or run an update package. You MIGHT be able to put the SSD in an enclosure that you connect via USB, run CrystalDiskMark and see the FW revision – but this si not guaranteed. You definitely will not be able to update the firmware this way. You will need to connect the SSD to a PC’ with an available M.2 PCIe (not M.2 SATA) slot. You can find out more about the firmware update process in the video below OR skip ahead to HERE in the video in a new tab and follow the instructions).

REALLY IMPORTANT! Connecting an SSD that was inside the PS5, into a PC might result in the PC requesting permission to initialize/format the drive – DO NOT DO THIS unless you are happy to have the disk data deleted (i.e you have a backup)! You should be able to view the drive in CrystalDiskInfo and Samsung Magician without initializing or formatting it to windows.Also, handle the drive carefully (static electricity etc) and do not attempt this unless you are comfortable with the installation process. It may well be that you have ok firmware in place already.

 

As mentioned several times in the article (and on the linked sources), complete details on this are quite spread out and full confirmation of the firmware issues is not clear right now. This article serves as a heads-up that you should check your firmware and, where appropriate, update to the latest revision! Also, Backup, Backup, BACKUP!

 

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      276 thoughts on “Samsung SSDs Dying! 980 Pro, 990, 970 EVO PLUS, PM9A1 and More Reporting Failures – Everything We Know So Far!

      1. my 2 Samsung ssd’s failed and Samsung Netherlands so called tech support neither solved nor offered replacement ! they suck! they cant offer replacement as they are cut off fund from samsung then so they choose to lie to costumers instead hopping that the lies will take them far! Anyway there is no method to flash ssd’s manually but if you are out of warranty which im not then can try making a usb bootable linus drive then copy burn an image from a new ssd onto the failed one!!! etc…i may do a tutorial if enough interest to show how i ditched the warranty and burned flashing ssd with new and fix ..
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      2. Mine keeps disconnecting as second drive on my gigabyte g5 KF laptop. Its still on 100% health. Tried everything from internet. Nothing helped yet. Its almost 3 months, no update from samsung.
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      3. I just got the 990 pro 2t. I did not know about this. On your list the product code ends with b/am (MZ-V9P2TOB/AM). My code ends with GW (MZ-V9P2TOGW). Does someone know the difference? I got it for ps5 and dont have a pc. I can not upgrade the firmware.
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      4. I was gonna buy Samsung 990 pro 4tb for £330 from samsung website for my PS5 now im not too sure i should get NVME ssd, far as i know PS5 dont update nvme firmwares and i have no PCs with nvme on motherboards either.
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      5. What… if the effin deal with Samsung firmware these days? In my mind, three possibilities exist: They’ve got high school kids designing firmware –or– it’s some sneaky way to insert crap onto on our hardware that we don’t want –or– Like many good things, quality is in the toilet. Correct me if I’m wrong but the problem units seem to be coming out of the Korea facilities.
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      6. Today I lost my Samsung SSD 980 pro 2 tb with heat sink on the ps5 and Samsung declined to even check attached is a video
        https://youtu.be/9R_yHQ4Wb34?si=cTt-5sKfwdFwSID8

        I will repalce with one from crossair
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      7. Got my 990 pro 4TB yesterday and ive literally run crystaldiskmark just a few times and well it devouring itself

        The accelerate degradation / wear is very much still and issue even fir the 4TB versions as some batches are clearly bad and i got a bad one
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      8. I know this video is about 9 months old. But I wanted to mention that I recently ‘lost’ my Samsung 970 Evo (SATA SSD), which was just about reaching a one year mark of usage in my system.

        I was merely watching YouTube actually, and suddenly my system hanged solid, nothing responded (even on the 2nd monitor where I had music videos playing, the sound froze, everything froze). Of course, like usual, I simply restarted my PC. However, after that restart, instead of going back to Windows it refused to ‘Post’ (to get past the BIOS). I became “stuck” in the BIOS because – apparently at that point – the Boot wasn’t working anymore, the drive itself was not being detected anymore in the BIOS (just gone).

        I CMOS’ed the BIOS, removed the Battery for a while, turned the PC back on, re-adjusted the BIOS settings (Optimized Defaults) and STILL nothing, drive was gone. I then decided to simply re-install the BIOS (EZ Flash, from USB device). Even THAT did nothing.

        At that point I had only one option, to re-install Windows on a completely different drive, and that worked (the other drive is Western Digital Blue, also SATA SSD). From that new Windows installation on the new drive, I did a Windows Memory Diagnostic (which is known to also check for drive failures and repair them when possible during the process). The Memory Diagnostic – in a way – confirmed there was a problem with the drive, because it eventually said that the “repair” of the affected drive was done at 100% (when in reality, no such repair happened). But in actuality, no repair was ‘done’ per se. After the Memory Diagnostic was done, went back to Windows, and tried to use BOTH the Windows Disk Management tool AND Samsung’s own Magician tool. And BOTH the Disk Management and Samsung’s Magician “hanged” for 15+ minutes doing nothing, and detecting nothing… it just kept on trying to detect… and trying… and nothing showed up.

        So yeah, my conclusion… my Samsung 970 Evo simply ‘died’ on me, just… boom, like that, gone. I didn’t do anything crazy with that drive, just installed Windows on it, it had some games, that’s it.

        Lesson learned, right now I have not one but 2 Windows installations (on my newer WD SSD drive, and on an older ‘backup’ HDD Drive) just in case. I’ll stick with Western Digital from now on, or maybe Seagate, never had any problems with their drives in 20 years of building computers.
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      9. yeah, my trust for samsung is forever lost. Just one year after purchase and I noticed my games started crashing with errors, and I saw how all my files started becoming corrupted here and there in the Samsung SSD EVO 870 2TB. Check showed critical errors everywhere in the drive. Lost many files. Managed to save some of the files that were not corrupted yet. Damn. I had Intel SSD that worked for 7 years flawlessly like a swiss clock as main system drive, left it in my old PC, it could still be working fine, and this samsung was used only as 3rd storage drive for keeping games and medias and still broke in a year, pathetic. Never buying samsung ssd anymore, overpriced useless trash.
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      10. Is it some kind of production batch which is not affected? So it is already with newest firmware without defect? I bought one from 30.05.2023 and I have no possibility to check the firmware or update it.. it was pure for ps5 with heatsink. What do you think?
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      11. In Western Australia, Australia, recently, from July to September 2023, around 300 Samsung 980 Pro 2TB drives, were auctioned of. Ranged in price from $130AUD to $180AUD. From what I understand, the S/N is one of the troubled ones, S69ENFOR, it was part of a massive Samsung product sell off. Can’t comment if it was factory, but would assume give the amount of Samsung products being auctioned. Of course in Australia, new, unopened, auctioned items only have a max of 30 days warranty, and after that you’re on your own. I noticed some of the PC reseller players had a field day feeding on cheap 2TB drives. Obviously to resell. Hope its only firmware, and not a reflection on the flash itself, or a combination of the two.
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      12. I just purchased two 990 Pro’s and put them in a Stripped Array, the Firmware for both is 3B2QJXD7. It seems I am not able to check Performance, Diagonstic, or Performance Optimization. The reason no volumes or portions can be found. All drives at setup in NTFS, two are Dynamic and one is Basic. Why can’t Magician see the volumes? Also when looking at the S.M.A.R.T. data what numbers should I be most interested in to check drive integrity. Like many I also have Samsung drives in many devices to include other PCs, PS5, and Synology NAS I will need to check. It seems this issue affected the EVO line as well. Thanks
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      13. List of Samsung NVMe SSD + firmware + DOM + POM. Taken from https://www.youtube.com/@prossd

        970 EVO 1T 2B2QEXE7 14 10 2020 Korea
        970 EVO PLUS 1 TB 4B2QEXM7 19 04 2022 Korea *with Elpis (gen. 4) not Phoenix (gen. 3)*
        970 EVO PLUS 500 GB 2B2QEXM7 04 01 2022 China
        970 EVO PLUS 500 GB 2B2QEXM7 21 06 2019 China
        PM9A1 2TB 3L2QGXB7 01 04 2021 China
        970 PRO 1TB 1B2QEXP7 23 01 2021 Korea
        970 EVO PLUS 1TB 2B2QEXM7 10 08 2020 Thailand
        970 EVO PLUS 1TB 2B2QEXM7 22 01 2022 China
        970 EVO PLUS 2TB 2B2QEXM7 18 10 2021 China
        970 EVO PLUS 2TB 2B2QEXM7 15 04 2021 China
        990 PRO 1TB 3B2QJXD7 16 05 2023 Korea w/ heatsink
        990 PRO 1TB 0B2QJXD7 28 10 2022 Korea
        990 PRO 1TB 3B2QJXD7 06 01 2023 Korea
        990 PRO 2TB 3B2QJXD7 10 11 2022 Korea
        990 PRO 2TB 0B2QJXD7 08 11 2022 Korea
        980 1TB 1B4QFXO7 11 02 2021 Korea
        980 PRO 500 GB 1B2QGXA7 29 09 2020 Korea
        980 PRO 1TB 2B2QGXA7 10 12 2020 China
        980 PRO 2TB 5B2QGXA7 21 09 2021 Vietnam
        *980 PRO 1TB 3B2QGXA7 30 10 2021 Korea w/ heatsink * affected firmware?*
        980 PRO 2TB 2B2QGXA7 14 01 2021 Korea
        980 PRO 1TB 5B2QGXA7 02 12 2021 Korea w/ heatsink
        980 PRO 1TB 5B2QGXA7 30 12 2022 China
        980 PRO 2TB 5B2QGXA7 23 09 2022 Vietnam
        980 PRO 1TB 5B2QGXA7 29 04 2022 Vietnam
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      14. I have a 970 Evo Plus 1TB that died last week. One fucking year old. Some of my data is on the Users folder, which I do not have permissions to access. To change the permission I would have to write on the SSD, and guess what, it’s stuck on read only. Great job Samsung!
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      15. I just installed a 990 pro ssd yesterday in my ps5, and just now discovered these post about issues. I don’t hope I will experience those. I don’t have a computer or possibility to update the ssd firmware.

        Also …. A but off topic ….
        I moved all my games from the console storage to my new ssd, but in the games folder in console storage it still says about 20gb used. Even though there’s nothing in there ? Is that normal ? ????
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      16. Completely avoid SAMSUNG now, they have probably internal issues with senior management, and SOP’s, and other internal issues, there is NO clarity, totally unacceptable. These chips are as critical as having surgery. I have heard enough of people with failures even with updates, so no thanks, i don’t need the chronic issues.
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      17. I’m glad that I found this video, mate! I was just in an online chat with a Samsung rep last night (July 20, 2023) – and he was pushing the 990 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD! Perhaps I’m being a bit cynical about this, but, in addition to having the 990 Pro series pushed by said Samsung rep, I’ve noticed that the prices for the same SSDs have been reduced. The obvious question is: Does this mean that these “defective” SSDs are still being sold to the public?
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      18. Been out of the loop a little bit on a lot of hardware stuff and I just saw this issue on my 2TB 980 PRO…. I’ve already updated to the latest firmware, but I’m doing the full scan and it’s not looking good; about 26% into the scan I can see over 18 bad blocks….

        And I also have a 2TB WD BLACK SN850 that I use on my laptop and early on it had a SMART error that showed critical, but I ignore it because I was only using the laptop casually, and I’m finally going through the RMA process on that as well.

        I’ve used SSDs for a long time, and this is probably the first time I’ve had failures like these, and across two different brands’ flagship products.
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      19. Does anyone have model number mz-v8p2t0cw production date of 2023 02 07 on the 980PRO? What firmware was on yours? I don’t have a PC to check it on, I purchased the drive for my PS5.
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      20. bought 10 days ago 980 normal 500GB NOT the Pro! Manufactured in 11.2022 … after 11 hrs. of running ~> 10 days of use: NOW READ ONLY ! Beware ! I updated my second one now to 3BQ4… still works. -.-
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      21. Thx just updated the firmware for both my samsung hardrives before i have used them much both scanned in perfects shape.Even tho i have the 1tb pro not the 2tb better safe than sorry.
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      22. I just find out this problem because my 970 evo plus just dead in Feb. I am so disappointed that Samsung should broadcast this issue or recall the products. Plenty people like me have no time to watch this kind of problems all the time.
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      23. What version of Windows are you running? I can not successfully install the Samsung Magician! When I install it, it loads down in the task bar and it highlights the software in a small window, but nothing on the monitor above. Just a translucent shaped pencil in the middle on the monitor. I am using Windows 11.
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      24. My Samsung 870 EVO 2TD SATA SSD failed after one and a half year of use as the primary drive of a desktop home PC. SSD was manufactured in 2021.11. Bought from Amazon on 2022.01. Died on 2023.06. No warning given. It died after doing a full system scan with Bitdefender. That must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. BIOS doesn’t detect the drive anymore. Moved the SSD to another PC as a secondary drive. BIOS detected it but Windows always does an automatic repair but doesn’t seem to help. It just powers off at 100%. Moved the SSD to different PC as a secondary drive. It ran the automatic repair and proceeded to Windows logon. But can’t access the drive using Windows Explorer. It just hangs and slows the whole PC. Task manager shows as 100% busy even though almost no KBytes/S on read or write.

      25. With several owners in the comments here, commenting on how trying to upgrade the firmware failed, and how Samsung did not honor a return/replacement, I’m staying clear of this brand. I was considering buying one because of the speed, but will have to look elsewhere now. Can anyone suggest one that’s just as fast, or faster while being more reliable?
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      26. Just got this issue with my 1-year-old 970 EVO plus (FW version 3B2QEXM7) and only a little bit over 8 TBW from their promised 600… Samsung sucks, now if they will ask for my dead drive then I will be out of warranty replacement as I have too much personal information over there, perhaps a convenient situation for them… It doesn’t help me that upgrading the drive would save it, this info came post-mortem… why they did not cooperate with Microsoft to push of their fw fix via regular updates? Never buy again Samsung products!!!
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      27. My 1TB 970 Evo Plus just died (Disk write error), and i bought it in September 2022 (only 9 months old), I only really installed games on it with long load times and only used about 400gb of it. Hopefully i get a replacement.
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      28. My 970 EVO Plus just up and died this week after 11 months of ownership. No warnings, still detected in bios, bios SSD test fails immediately. Detected but will not boot. Tried CSM legacy to no avail. I had a lot of data on there. Instant death is far worse than a conventional HDD slowly dying. I had no chance to even recover any data.
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      29. I’ve just got the 990 pro for my laptop do I do the update before puting it in or after I’ve put it in thank you for this video super helpful ????I just wish I seen this video before I got it so leave a like ???? so we can get the word out and because this guy is super helpful giving us this information ℹ️ thanks dude
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      30. I experienced this just now with my two SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB NVME PCIE 4.0 after 1 week of using it but suddenly both 2 990 m.2 went undetected. I can’t update the firmware since it’s not detected in Samsung Magician Software. 🙁
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      31. I have a samsung 2tb 990pro as bootdrive when i launched samsung magician it says i have the latest firmware but its still on 0B2Q the newer one is 1B2Q it seems it doesnt detect the newest firmware, any solutions for this?
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      32. Hello, I bought the Samsung 990 pro 1 tb m2 ssd model. my motherboard is asus tuf x570-plus wifi model, my bios is up to date.

        When I first plugged the 990 pro, windows was not installed.

        My 970 evo ssd also had windows installed. and both ssd’s looked fine in samsung magician program.

        When I installed windows 11 on 990 pro, I got the error “the device is connected to the driver that magician does not support” in the magician program.

        Then I reinstalled windows 10 and the problem went away.

        but now there is the problem of “the device is connected to the driver that magician does not support” again in windows 10.

        990 pro firmware version is up to date!

        please help.
        Thanks.
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      33. Makes perfect sense to not trust SamSuck, since they had to be taken to federal court in an expensive set of litigations, which lasted for 7 long years, by Apple Computer with SamSuck proven guilty, guilty, guilty, for stealing patented features off the iPhone and illegally using them on their own phones. Why trust proven criminals with any of their products??
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      34. Unfortunately my Samsung 970 Evo Plus running the firmware “3B2QEXM7” (which is different from the one which is known to fail “3B2QGXA7”) has been hit yesterday. It was my OS/Primary drive, meaning my PC is entirely shafted and it took me 2 days to finally figure it out when scanning the SSD on ubuntu through an USB-Stick finally revealed that it was in read only mode. I don’t know if Samsung will compensate and send me a new SSD, as these reportedly have 5 years of warranty and mine is just 1.5 years old.
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      35. My drive (980 pro w/heatsink 2TB) production date 2023 – 02 – 20 made in Korea was shipped with the latest firmware on it (5B2QGXA7)

        I don’t have an M.2 slot on my MB, but I did buy a PCIe to M.2 adapter to check. I did not need to mount the drive, just plugged the drive with adapter in MB, booted up system and launched the Samsung Magician app.

        Note that I formatted the drive with a PS5 before plugging it in the computer and because of the adapter I was using, the Samsung app couldn’t run the test that shows each sector like shown in this video

        Samsung really should have indicated what firmware the drive shipped with on the box as I believe a number of people like myself bought the drive only for their PS5 and would have never plugged it in a PC.
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      36. So I only just learned of this AFTER my 980 PRO 2TB running firmware 3B2QGXA7 died and flipped into readonly mode. I’m not even too mad about the data loss, but they damn well better send me a new one! Anyone know how to go about doing this??
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      37. Absulute garbage. First one failed after 14tb of data transfer, second one was brand new, failed within a week after 500gb of data transfer. Both would cause files to corrupt and windows 11 to bluescreen.
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      38. @everyone after firmware update has it completely solved the dying / health degrading issue for you? have you been observing it since then? i have already been using 980 pro 2tb but since this happening i feel hesitant now, was just about to order 2tb 990 pro expecting as its an update and hoping it would not have such an issue and now i see this… i dont feel mental peace buying 990 pro after seeing all this on several platfroms
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      39. I have a brand new 1TB Samsung 990 PRO. I tried the firmware update which Magician indicates is available, but the firmware update keeps failing. The message that I get is “Failed to update firmware on the selected drive.” I also have two Samsung 980 PRO 2TB drives on this system which have been performing well since October 2022.
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      40. I got in touch with Samsung support, they kindly agreed to update my brand new 990 pro 2TB ssd. I have no equipment to do it myself, they will update firmware for me. I intend to use it in my PS5.
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      41. Mine has degraded by 6% in the 8 days since I have installed it (checked when I found out about this issue).. I took it back and they said they won’t warranty it.. so why would I install the update, that won’t fix the current 6%, when I could just destroy the drive in a few days and they will have to cover it since they warranty 1200TB of writes?.. seriously considering this ????
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      42. I recently had to replace two original 870EVO 1TB made in 2021 Korea, sealed from Samsung store in Amazon. Firmware update didn’t fix the issue. I quickly got a refund from Amazon 1.3y after purchase and I got new 2TB ones from 2022 China. Let’s see if these hold up but at least is pretty easy to refund them. I have much older 860 EVO and 970 Pro that exhibit no errors.
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      43. Please can you talk about that bad performance that’s affecting the 990 Pro? The write speeds are all over the place. I don’t know if this is because of the new firmware, but there are some reports (including mine) on reddit.
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      44. I’ve personally never had any issues with my samsung 970 evo pluses. I’ve been running a 500gb 970 evo plus for over 2 years. Just recently upgraded my other rig and slotted in a 2tb 970 evo plus about a month ago. Hopefully this isn’t an issue with newer models, but this is just my personal experience. Haven’t had any problems so far.

        Note: I’ve also never done a single firmware update on any of my ssd’s. Didn’t know that was a thing. Maybe that’s why mine lasted so long?
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      45. Don’t know what you are talking about. I got ZERO issues with Samsung NVME. I have 970 pro – 980pro and 990 pro…they work GREAT. You should NEVER enable S.M.A.R.T. feature on NVME drives…NEVER! It will break the drive.
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      46. Samsung RMA sucks. 980pro2Tb..fail….its like pulling teeth to get fixed or replaced 8 hours of trying and counting. DO NOT BUY. They don’t stand behind their product! What’s your time worth? Really Samsung doesn’t care. Firmware doesn’t fix damages….nor does repair work bricked!
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      47. Man, Samsung RMA sucks. 980pro2Tb..fail….its like pulling teeth to get fixed or replaced 8 hours of trying and counting. DO NOT BUY. They don’t stand behind their product! What’s your time worth? Samsung doesn’t care.
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      48. I lost 500gb samsung ssd evo 850
        All files change to raw i cannot acess the drive and gi the problemer to seagate old drive 1tb
        I don’t know is happenvafter install samsung magician or other things
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      49. Hi, I have recently bought a Samsung 980 1 TB made in Viet-Nam (production date 2022/10/06). Samsung magician shows that there’s a firmware update available from the existing 2B4QFX07 to the newer 3B4QFX07. The diagnostic scan doesn’t show any bad sector. Besides, I don’t know if the 3B4QFX07 is bug-free. So I am hesitating to update. Please advise.
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      50. I had to recover and reformat my friend’s 2x 970 pros because they were completely filled with loops or something fishy.
        He then downloaded a virus once I got his PC running…
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      51. Problems with 970 EVO Plus Model MZ-V7S1TO purchased 2 June 2020. Samsung Magician tests “Failed to complete the operation due to unknow error. Please click OK to refresh and try again.” Have RMA from Samsung.
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      52. I thought I was on to something for a bit there by finding problems cropping up with Samsung ssd’s then your vid :/ looks like my 970 Evo+ is just straight up effed. Or my mobo. I’m not checking now though. Requires a bit more effort than I have at the moment.
        If anyone’s ssd decides to shut off one day and start working the next for seemingly no reason and doing a diagnostic comes up clean. Just back it up anyway. Because like me you might come back to it a week later and it shits itself again.
        I have hard drives from 10 years ago in better condition than a 3 yr old SSD that says it’s fine with only 14.5 TBW.
        Only consolation at this point is it wasn’t my boot drive and nothing crucial on there. Oh and of course still in warranty
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      53. Yes my 970 evo just so happens to be produced on the 6th of April in the effected batch hooray, I thought buying a Samsung ssd would be problem free as everyone sings praise to them, meanwhile I could have saved $60 and just got another Kingston ssd which work perfectly fine.????
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      54. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I have 7 Samsung SSDs and most of them run daily, some of them since 2015.
        Lucky with WD HDDs too, never failed and some are recicled from some mid 2000s desktop pc.
        The only one that failed, a decade ago, was a Seagate HDD.
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      55. Let me be clear. People with version 4B2 are ALSO effected by this ssd problem.. because those drives with 4B2 are declining in health without proper SMART health monitoring. But when you update firmware to 5b2, your damage is done and you may actually brick your ssd instantly during that upgrade. So basically, if you have 4b2 youre damned if you do, and damned if you dont. Just get an RMA if you own one of these made before last week Please notice how ALL the sellers have a sale on these models NOW. As if they KNOW they all need replaced. ALL of them
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      56. Honestly, if I were building a computer right now, I would probably get a Firecuda anyway given that they are rated for more total writes.

        Most people aren’t going to notice speed above a Gen 3×4 anyway, so you might as well base your purchasing decisions on total writes.

        I don’t remember what I have in my Synology. It might be good to explain how to update SSD firmware in a NAS.
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      57. Building a multi pc system and have no doubt Samsung will iron out firmware with updates. I am currently building my gaming rig with 6x Western Digital blue sata ssd as my primary drive and 1x Western Digital blue m.2 nvme as my cache. Office pc 1x Kingston sata ssd and 1x Kingston m.2 nvme primary drive. Looking forward to doing a build with a Samsung setup. Cheers ???? keep up the good work ????
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      58. I have a range of the devices and firmware is up to date, no issues to date. Any chance the issues are related to the many counterfeit devices around? I wouldn’t put any credence in anything reported out of China, as Samsung are whipping their arse on phones and all levels of Chinese media lie through their teeth.
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      59. I’ve got an M1 Mac Mini. Just looked at this, and it looks like I’ve got no real recourse for my 980 pro. Magician tool only works for pc? Ridiculous…. They’ve really wrecked their rep not just in the product, but in how they’re handling (or not handling) it.
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      60. I was running several 980 Pro drives in multiple systems. None of them the 2TBs models though. I began replacing my 980 Pro drives with the SN850x drives. It’s faster anyway. At this point I will not touch a 990 model. Samsung has egg on their face over this issue.
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      61. You talk a lot about there may be a problem, there may be a solution. It took me less time to download the Samsung Magician, back up my boot drive (980 Pro 2TB) update the firmware on my boot drive than it did to listen to you prattle on. Did it help? I don’t know.
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      62. Bought a 990 Pro 1TB in Dec 22 for a new PC build C drive. On either Samsung Magician or Crystal Benchmark this drive gave read speeds between about 4,000 and 6,000 MB/s and write speeds of around 1,500 MB/s. Tested a lot as I could not really beleive the poor results. Sent back to CCL. On the same build a 980 Pro 2TB is doing 6,100 read and 4,093 write. No age or fault problems showing, just poor performance and the 990 Pro was a long way away from stated values and worse than the 980 Pro. The machine also boots a touch faster now I have switched to 980 Pro. The 980 Pro seems slightly slower since I switched to using as C drive so no idea why that is. Also feels snappier than the 990 Pro though. My son has a 980 Pro 1TB as a C drive that has been running fine for 23 months and he uses his PC a lot. (9hrs per day at least) Had a lot of trouble with a Crucial SSD drive about 15 yrs ago so switched to Samsung. Not sure I will be staying with Samsung as I have lost confidence in them.
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      63. I checked my firmware for my 980 Pro Dec 2022 that was on the list of affected models, Luckily it was already on the current firmware. Now I have to check another affected 980 Pro that I purchased in Feb 2022 but it’s in my PS5…
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      64. Those drives can get pretty warm, some even have a cooling system attached, so maybe depending on where they are placed on the MB they may not get cooled properly. With my motherboards there was coolers that I can stick on them and there is probably a reason for this.
        With HDD it was the same, i experienced some damaged HDD some years ago then i installed fans to cool them and i never had any failure since.
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      65. I bought in January 2023 two 2TB 990PROs. And I’m happy now that I didn’t have time to plug them in to PC yet.
        So they have 0GB usage and I can apply firmware update on factory unused drives.
        The question is – what the update is doing? is it a bug fix, or is it a trick to cheat the smart statistics (when the issue of degradation will be still there).
        If that issue is the software (firmware code) only, then okay – they can fix it. But if that issue is the hardware related only? What they else can do -instead of cheat the smart statistics to calm down the user.
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      66. This is our fault!
        Few years ago we had on the markert expensive SSDs with the best MLC memory chips and cheaper with the worst TLC. The long story short – TLC degradation is two or three times faster than MLC. And what we did? We didn’t read about differences between them, we didn’t want to pay more – we started to picked up the cheapest SSDs available, because why to overprice something, when you can get the same cheaper, right?
        And now this is the punishment.
        Manufacturer stoped use expensive MLC. They stop to continue developing/evolution of MLC. Because not enough people was buying expensive SSDs with MLC memory chips.

        Samsung 960/970 EVO has TLC, 960/970 PRO has MLC (so xxx PRO always means MLC memory, and non pro version – TLC)
        BUT starting from 980 PRO – there is no MLC anymore – this time it has TLC, and the same with 990 pro – also TLC.

        There is no MLC SSDs right now on the market! They all gone. They abandon the best memory chips (MLC), for cheaper, the worst TLC and trying to squeeze impossible things from it.
        And now we have the resoults.
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      67. if this helps I checked my 980 pro with heatsink, that I put in my ps5 that I purchased in September 23. this drive was manufactured 2022 08 03 which it written on the box. The samsung software said it had the latest update already installed. So if you have one in you ps5 and can check the box for its production date you may be fine like I was. I did not mount disk in pc but crystal disk said it was good 100% and the media section to look out for all showed zeros
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      68. Samsung has been using the parts that would be tossed a few years ago. I lost 2 SSD’s and a TV after 5 months. They said yeah we know the TV has issues but we don’t know what to do about it. Then locked the thread and marked it solved. I will not purchase anything that has a Samsung provided part in it let alone their brand crap.
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      69. I see the 980 Pros are the cheapest they’ve ever been on PCPartPicker right now, so is it worth buying one over a cheaper Kingston drive so long as I update my firmware immediately after installation?
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      70. Super thanks for the update! I just cancelled my order for a Samsung 2TB 980 Pro MVMe at Amazon and replaced it with an order for a WD Black 2TB SN850X MVMe which was even slightly cheaper. Will be adding it to my PS5. So glad to have avoided falling into that Samsung Rabbit Hole. ????
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      71. Had bad sectors crop up on a 10 month old 870 EVO , the warranty(local) was one year in my country and Samsung quietly rolled out an update which fixed the problem but the drive still has reallocated bad sectors. The number went up as I scanned the drive with Magician. They were also pretty quiet about it back then, went on reddit and there were forums full of people complaining about dead 870 to bad sectors developing out of the blue.
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      72. My 2tb 990 pro has lost 5% health with only about 2.2 tb read and 1.7 written for a total of 218 hours of functioning . I did the update as soon as it was released and so far, it’s staying put at 95% health status; fingers crossed it doesn’t get any worse, but I still have a hard time accepting that I won’t be regaining these 5% lost for barely a month’s use. Thanks Samsung 😐
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      73. I bougth a 980 pro nvme 3 months ago, no problems so far, have 2 more ssd from Samsung 2 years of use no problems so far, i’ve updated the 980 pro to the new update > 5B2QGXA7 with magician cuz someone said with that new update didn’t give anymore trouble.. lets see
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      74. Also, windows users can update the firmware from Samsung Magician software from the Samsung website, or if you have a DVD drive that software does come with some of their SSD then you can update it once installed
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      75. I already had 2 ssd 860 evo’s dying. Now I need to worry about my 2 980Pro’s, I thought let’s not skimp on my SSD’s and buy something good, that turned out great….
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      76. *Feb 15/02/23* – Updated Information on the Samsung M.2 NVMe SSD Firmware Issue. You can find out more in the article and video below:
        Samsung 990 Pro SSD Firmware Failures UPDATED Video – https://youtu.be/ZkiYghAGCOQ
        Samsung 990 Pro SSD Failures UPDATED Article – https://nascompares.com/news/samsung-990-pro-ssd-failures-updated-official-response-replacements-more/
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      77. just had my boot drive 980 non pro just died. got home from work to a blue screen of deth and boot looping
        took a new drive and it worked. any recommendations for a good ssd that won’tdie in the first 3 months
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      78. Yah I’m pretty much done with Samsung drives. I’ve had to replace my 980 pro boot drive twice in the past year. And I use a separate game drive. I literally don’t do anything besides game on my PC. I went with seagate firecuda this time. Samsung won’t get any more of my money.
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      79. Both my EVO 850 and 870s failed after general use for a few years. Yes random failure non-mountable at boot. My Crucial BX500 suffered from a write slowdown where it eventually could not write to itself while running. recommend buying Enterprise grade SSDs always.
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      80. Swap disk is frying SSD hard drives due to insufficient ram memory. Just go to your activity monitor in Apple and it tells You the situation facing your memory. Remember swap disk is bad for SSD… only 150 teraflops before the 256GB SSD burns out…
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      81. I installed a 2nd samsung ssd yesterday and samsung wizard won’t detect it. It’s working perfectly fine otherwise but it makes me nervous given I just spent $160 on it and I can’t find any related issues
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      82. Well, I do not think it is a firmware issue as I am running the latest firmware on my 980 pro 2TB, manufactured on 7-24-2021, but was purchased from Best Buy on 9-4-2021. I was having some issues with PC lately, running sluggish, and had a couple blue screen out of the blue. Thought, it might be my overclock on either cpu, or gpu. After hearing about this, I looked at smart, and found the media errors were over 2000. Ran a quick scan did not show any bad blocks, but did give a message of integrity errors. Click the resolve button, but it failed. Tried the full slow scan, then that is when I got two red blocks. I have a second one, but that was just a clone backup of this drive, and not use much, only for backing up every month or so. At the moment it has no errors, and was manufactured on 7-23-2021. Samsung with all it technology needs to update their website to have a easy way to request a rma, or speak to support. Looks like I have to call them personally, and speak to someone. I just purchased two of the newest WD black’s, and will run them instead. Thanks for this information!
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      83. I read about this bug in the 3xxxx firmware and updated my 980 pro 2tb to 5xxxx. After that, it doesn’t work correctly anymore. I use(d) this drive in a TB-case as the boot drive of my Mac mini M1 and now it’s slow as hell. Booting takes 15 min or so. As i don’t own a windows machine, my brother made the update for me. He also has the exact same SSD and his drive still works. So in essence, my drive is not completely bad (not in the “write only”-state) but it’s completely unusable. Any suggestions? My fear is that if i send it back for warranty it’s not obvious that it dosen’t work correctly, it’s just very slow. BTW: the activity LED on my TB-case is blinking all the time after power up. It seems to do _something_ but even after i had my Mac powered up continuously for a few days the SSD didn’t stop blinking..
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      84. I have a Samsung 980 1TB non-Evo/pro NVME that I got in November during Black Friday before this issue became known, however so far I have had zero issues and my drive seems fine.
        I am keeping an eye on it of course, hopefully I will be okay but yeah maybe I will stop buying Samsung for a while.
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      85. The 990 PRO is the worst!
        I have two Samsung M.2 SSD:
        970 Evo (not plus, just evo) Power on count: 905, Power on hours: 15194, Total writes 31779 GB and at 97% health no errors
        990 Pro Power on count: 8, Power on hours: 28, Total writes: 544 GB and at 99% health….

        Not happy, and what do i do now? Keep this one and wait for the update and then return it.. Or buy a worse and more expensive SSD. (990 PRO is at 99 Euro’s atm @NL)
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      86. add this to your mental notes about my failure with a Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB NVMe drive, the drive failed at approximately 8 months after I purchased it, it was my OS drive running Windows 10, the failure for me was very interesting in the sense that, I was able to use the drive I could use my computer. I did just about anything I wanted to do… Until I discovered I could not transfer files using Windows,…. I joined a youtube channel called ” live Windows training-Doug Betts” and demonstrated the problem… Episode LonnDawg Remote Troubleshooting File Explorer Crashing 12/22/2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdgrkYhoTbM&t=5619s again the failure kind of puzzled me because in general the machine was working just fine except for one particular function… And not finding much on the Internet to repair such a failure, I asked for help.
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      87. I hope this is just a typo:

        “Although the bulk of the initially reported failures that people were experiencing with firmware 5B2QGXA7 rise appeared in China”

      88. I had a Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB 2000.3 GB Firmware 3B2QGXA7 100% Bad with Critical Warning and Available Spare. should of noticed then Synology active backup for Business started to fail.
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      89. Had a 970 EVO 1TB and an 870 EVO 2TB that got many errors at (970) 5,6 and (870) 6,1 TBW

        Managed to return them and got new ones that seem to be fine. They have different firmware compared to the old drives I had. Did not update firmware back then.

        Firmware of the 970 EVO was 3B2QEXM7
        Don’t remember what the firmware of the 870 was. Only remember it to be different when I checked when replacing them.

        Might be worthwhile to check for issues even if the SSD is not an NVMe drive.
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      90. My 2tb 870 evo died last week it lasted nearly 2 years, Think it was because I shut down the computer (cpu fan wasn’t spinning)
        It was strange, Windows wouldn’t read it but I put it in a ubuntu laptop and it read it??? format recognised as raw, couldn’t format it again . . .
        Amazon gave a refund ????
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      91. I just bought 2 980 PROs recently from Amazon before these news came out… Haven’t installed them yet. Should they be safe to use after updating the firmware, or should I wait a bit more before using them?
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      92. I have a lot of Sammy M.2’s. One System has a 1tb 980 pro as boot with 2tb 970 EVO Plus and mine, using right now has 500gb 790 EVO Plus as boot and gaming drive a 1tb 790 EVO Plus. Mine as I can look at are Firmware 2B2QEXM7 (970 E+ 500gb) AND 4B2QEXM7 (790 E+1TB) Weird how they both say I am running the most current firmware but have different first numbers.
        Can’t look at the other system right now. As they are fairly new. Like, two months old.
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      93. I got a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB around the time it was released (March 2021) and it recently died (Read only mode) start of December last year (2022), it was my boot drive so my computer stopped working. Luckily, I had backups, so I was able to get up and running pretty quickly.
        but me having my 980 Pro my boot drive wasn’t the worst part, I tried to get a replacement from the shop I got the SSD from (Centrecom), and they said my SSD wasn’t faulty (According to their testing).
        I asked if they did a write test on the SSD, they said yes (A lie as you’ll see soon), I took their word for it (Maybe it was skill issue on my part) went home and tried to reinstall Windows (It failed ofc), I thought maybe the formatting was messed up so I tried to format within Linux but that also failed (Got a read only error).
        I went back to the shop and told them that it’s not working and this time I made them do a write test, at this point they confirmed the issue I was having but still refused to replace it, they blamed me for having it in read only mode.
        I explained SSDs enter read only mode state when they die but they ignored me, at this point they offered to “repair” my computer for $150, I refused as I know what I’m doing, and so I went home with no replacement being forced to contact Samsung for my replacement.
        I make an RMA request at Samsung, mail in my SSD and 2 weeks later they confirm my fault (And I think I’m finally at the end of the road) but it takes another 2 weeks for Samsung to say that they have no replacements available and instead offer me a refund. I give them all my details needed for the refund and I get silence, it took about 3 weeks for them to send a form for me to fill out for my refund (Sent Yesterday) and now I have to wait 14 days for my money to arrive in my bank account.

        I have gone through literal hell just to get a refund for my SSD that I spent $500 for, I’m extremely bitter at this point and I’m not going to be buying any Samsung Product, and I sure as hell won’t be buying it from Centrecom.

        I live in Australia, and we have very strict consumer protection laws, Centrecom in particular has egregiously violated these laws, I never thought that a shitshow like this could happen here.
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      94. Really helpful video, thanks! I have the dreaded 3B2QGXA7 firmware in two 2tb drives. Question: I have a Razor Core X with a GPU in it connected to my 2018 Macbook pro via thunderbolt 3. Can I get an NVME PCIe card, plug my 980 pro into that inside the Razer Core X & do the firmware that way? Or is it just not possible over thunderbolt at all, even with a PCIe card in an enclosure?
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      95. I had a DS220+ fitted with 2x1TB 870 EVO’s. The NAS reported a drive starting to fail so I purchased 2 replacements. The disk then failed so I added the new disk, whilst re-building the RAID the second 870 died – all data lost ????Both 870’s were purchased in Dec 2021, I did some basic tests and the only errors I could find were bad sectors, I may put them in a PC and follow your testing guide.
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      96. Scamsung products are garbage. I have multiple devices from phones, monitors, fridge, dishwasher, and TVs that die early or have erratic behaviors. I will buy another Samshit product again.
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      97. Just recently bought a 2TB 980 pro ssd for my future pc build. Is there anyway to test the ssd without a pc to plug it into. Thought this was a safe purchase seeing how everyone recommends them.
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      98. I have encountered this issue (surging Media and Data Integrity Errors entries in SMART and failing Full Scan in Samsung Magician) in July last year. With sheer luck, I have spotted it early. I somehow managed to contain and recover the situation by performing secure erase and a firmware update.
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      99. my 970 evo 1 tb crashed last week tried everything reinstalling bios fresh windows 11 install nothing worked. bought a new 990 pro 1 tb ssd now well see if this one actually works. Got one year out of my 970 evo 1tb
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      100. I owned an addlink for about 5 months and it just recently died. Thankfully it had a 5 year warranty. Thankfully everything stored was easily replaced. I think ssds in general are a new tech and we are seeing the failures of it now.
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      101. I have 2 Samsung T7 2TB ext drives. I paid $400 ea. They BOTH failed at about 6mos. Samsung is giving me an extensive hard time for support. These drives were periodically Smart checked with no indications of regression. Lost all Data, which Samsung will not offer recovery. I blame myself, of course. These drives now go for UNDER $150. Big loss overall ! Good bye Samsung. Buyers beware ! Thanx for this Mate !????
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      102. My last drive 980 pro went all the way to 0% took about 3 months of straight writing but should show you SSDs aren’t just dying like I know people who are running Chia plot nvmes at 0% for the last 3 months and it’s still kicking and writing 108gb plot files with no errors.. just because your drive says it’s 0% doesn’t mean jack!
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      103. Dude I farm Xch chia and I have 120 drives 18tb and guess what I’ve only used about 3 nvmes to get 1.638PIB!! Stop the CHIA crap and look how they have made it sooo much better for people who have 128gb of ram it barely touches the nvmes! Now they use ram disk for most the writing and use the nvme to read so it doesn’t kill it as fast at all!
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      104. I just built a new PC with a 980 pro 2tb m.2. This is not what I was expecting when buying a samsung ssd. Are they working on fixes or am I going to have to purchase a new 2TB m.2?

        Upgrading from a 2.5 sata 240GB from a cheap-o back in 2016, so I’m very unfamiliar with m.2’s
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      105. You cannot use any external dock or USB converter as the firmware upgrade process will need to detect an NVMe drive connected directly to PCIe. You CAN, however, use an M.2 M key PCIe expansion card with a desktop machine with open PCIe slot to upgrade your firmware. Most NVMe drives use 4 PCIe lanes, so an expansion card with support for one NVMe drive will use 4 PCIe lanes, support for 2 drives means 8 PCIe lanes, and support for 4 cards means 16 PCIe lanes like a graphics card.
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      106. I’m wondering if you could do a video comparing the 4K h265 transcoding for the Minis or MinisForum mini computers. Since my NAS will not do the transcoding I was thinking about putting one of the Minis mini computers next to my TV and have it run Plex pulling the data over Ethernet from my NAS. I contacted MinisForum to see what box would do this for the lowest cost and their response was that they could not recommend a system but would choose one with a discrete graphics chip. I’m just wondering if this would be a cost effective option and where the sweet spot would be in their lineup.
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      107. I upgrade a lot of Intel era Apple iMacs and laptops using NVMe with adapters. I’ve switched from Samsung to WD Black as I’ve has several failures from Samsung drives and the WD are proving to be faster and, so far, more reliable.
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      108. *Samsung pushing an update to the drive truly doesn’t fix it! The update is basically hiding the problems, so you can’t see them.. You should know that SOFTWARE can not repair HARDWARE problems it can only hide them and try to prevent any more damage from happening!*
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      109. i hv asus z690 plus tuf wifi d4 motherboard. i wana fill my three m.2 slots .
        which one i shud buy among 2tb 970 evo plus or 2tb 980 pro
        im using 850 evo and 860 evo since launch
        & 970 evo plus since 12th gen launch
        P.S. 980 pro lacks the nvme driver unlike 970 evo plus
        do we any other brand that has good software and driver support.
        please advice me????
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      110. Had 2 2TB 980 PRO fail on me, one lasted about 5 months and the other just under 4 months.
        Both started spitting out large numbers of SMART media errors and data corruption (luckily nothing valuable was lost).
        Luckily replaced with other brands that are still working ~12 months later.
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      111. To be clear … you cant hook up an affected drive to your motherboard via external usb , using enclosures etc … but does that mean that you can only hook the drive up to the board using the M.2 spot on the board, or can you rig an enclosure up to run directly off of a sata connection on the board?

        And if the drive in question IS ACTUALLY your C: or system drive, can you run the update on it as the system drive, or does the updating drive have to be mounted as a secondary drive to the system, likely requiring a second M.2 spot on the board?
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      112. So after watching this, a bunch of crypto miners are whining because they’ve raped their computers along with every component including their m.2 SSDs and they’re whining like little babies. Got it.
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      113. I have a lot of 980 Pro and 970 EVO M.2s with absolutely NO SMART ERRORS. I did however update to the latest firmware but there was only one to my understanding affected firmware and most firmware versions are only a month or two before a revision. Meaning the chances of you having a bad firmware are extremely small.
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      114. Interesting topic. I’m using a 980 PRO as an external SSD for my Mac Studio for photo & music libraries. The Samsung SSD is already on an automated backup schedule to a traditional external hard drive, and I use DriveDX to monitor the health of all my drives, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on the SMART stats from now on.
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      115. Samsung is beginning to disappoint me, I rent an apt with a samsung fridge, it already making noise, my parents have a samsung clothing dryer, it broke in 5 years. Samsung TVs were a good deal but their OS they began to put into TVs is very laggy and lackluster…. SSDs were the only thing I still trust them with, and I have their sata ssds…
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